Perhaps the only thing that changes more rapidly than technology in today's amped-up digital environment is the terminology used to describe that technology and its impact on consumers--and marketers. One recent example is the advent of the term "omnichannel" marketing, which many struggle to differentiate from another relatively recent term--"multichannel" marketing. Still, those who are most enmeshed in the field say there is a key distinction between the two, and it's one that will have an impact on marketers as they continue to seek ways of having a meaningful impact on the consumers they hope to engage. And, importantly, it's less about technology than it may seem.

Endeca Announces Manufacturing and Distribution Search Solutions

Endeca, a provider of guided navigation, search, and analysis solutions, has announced the availability of new Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions, a combination of information retrieval applications and services expertise. The solutions are designed to help manufacturers and suppliers boost parts reuse and strategic sourcing initiatives, improve customer service, drive online sales, and reduce costs by making it easier for people to find products, parts, and components information. The new solutions are the direct result of Endeca's work with manufacturers, suppliers, and business-to-business catalogers. The new solutions fall into three major categories: Product Data Navigator Solutions, Product Catalog Search Solutions, and Website Search and Navigation Solutions.

Product Data (Lifecycle) Management (PDM/PLM) solutions are essential for engineering and design initiatives like parts reuse, strategic sourcing, inventory reduction, and more. But poor information retrieval, restricted access, and high seat and training costs have limited their true potential. Designed for employee and partner-facing engineering and design applications, the Endeca Product Data Navigator gives manufacturers powerful yet intuitive search and Guided Navigation capabilities to unlock these and other critical information assets - and expose this data to a wider user base. It combines the two most common means of seeking information - search and browse - into a single integrated function, giving users the ability to quickly and easily find products, parts, components and related information through a zero-training, web-based interface. With the Endeca Product Data Navigator, pre-built content adapters can combine data from multiple systems, like PLM, ERP and virtually any other information repository to create an integrated view of data from multiple silos without need for expensive and complicated information integration projects.

Product Catalog Search Solutions are designed to expose the depth of business-to-business catalogs, ease customer discovery of relevant products, move sales to lower cost online channels, and boost online transactions, Endeca's product search and Guided Navigation solutions support large catalogs. Unique features include Dynamic Merchandising, to enable simple creation and management of relevant cross-sell and up-sell promotions based on search terms and navigation paths and Custom Catalogs that filter the master catalog to display subsets of catalog content and customer-specific pricing.

Website Search and Navigation Solutions are designed to make it far easier to find content available on corporate Web sites and partner extranets, while reducing dependence on and usage of offline channels. Endeca's content search and Guided Navigation solutions connect online visitors (customers, prospects, investors, partners, job seekers, press, etc.) with company and product information. These solutions can search content from hundreds of types of file formats and repositories, in a variety of languages. Unique Content Spotlighting promotes most popular relevant content based on search terms and browse path.(www.endeca.com)